Re: Cabal bugs

5 Mar 2008

      On Wed, 2008-03-05 at 08:41 +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote:
...
Hi
...
Both errors are a consequence of the fact that we do not know what
 packages are installed for hugs. It is printing all the packages that it
 thinks are missing, that is... none.
For cabal-install, I can accept this. But from what you are saying
cabal seems to have recently become broken so that it just won't work
with Hugs at all? That is a real shame.
I said:
...
So that second error simply needs to be fixed because the Cabal lib
has previously worked with implementations that do not track installed
packages. The sensible fix is probably just to skip the check entirely
for hugs and other implementations where we do not know the installed
packages.
And I've pushed the fix:

Wed Mar  5 02:36:26 GMT 2008  Duncan Coutts 
  * Fix configure for hugs where we don't know what packages are installed
  For Hugs, nhc98 and other compilers we do not know what packages are
  already installed, so we just make some up, pretend that they do exist
  and just hope for the best. We make them up based on what other package
  the package we're currently building happens to depend on.
  See inventBogusPackageId. Let's hope they really are installed... :-)
  One could see this as all rather redundant - carefully making up bogus
  information to satisfy a careful check. I prefer to see it as making
  explicit something that was previously implicit. The proper solution is
  to discover what packages are currently installed.
...
...
For a future hugs release it would be enormously helpful if it would
 include the InstalledPackageInfo files for all the bundled packages and
 if there was a way of discovering what directory to look in to find
 these packages. Then we could build a proper index of the installed
 packages as we do for ghc. Also we need a hugs --version flag so Cabal
 can actually figure out the hugs version so it knows whether it supports
 an installed package database. Currently hugs is almost unversioned
 (check System.Info.compilerVersion).
File suffient bugs (http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hugs) and
hopefully they will get fixed.
Ok.

Duncan